the knowledge of a number of signs, only for the purpose of discarding
them when he is proficient enough to make an individual system. It is
also accepted in music, where only the advanced pianist or singer can
afford to play tricks with _tempo_. And I am sure it should be accepted
in acting.
Nowadays acting is less scientific (except in the matter of
voice-production) than it was when I was receiving hints, cautions, and
advice from my two dramatist friends, Charles Reade and Tom Taylor; and
the leading principles to which they attached importance have come to be
regarded as old-fashioned and superfluous. This attitude is
comparatively harmless in the interpretation of those modern plays in
which parts are made to fit the actors and personality is everything.
But those who have been led to believe that they can make their own
rules find their mistake when they come to tackle Shakespeare or any of
the standard dramatists in which the actors have to fit themselves to
the parts. Then, if ever, technique is avenged!
All my life the thing which has struck me as wanting on the stage is
_variety_. Some people are "tone-deaf," and they find it physically
impossible to observe the law of contrasts. But even a physical
deficiency can be overcome by that faculty for taking infinite pains
which may not be genius but is certainly a good substitute for it.
When it comes to pointing out an example, Henry Irving is the monument,
the great mark set up to show the genius of _will_. For years he worked
to overcome the dragging leg, which seemed to attract more attention
from some small-minded critics (sharp of eye, yet how dull of vision!)
than all the mental splendor of his impersonations. He toiled, and he
overcame this defect, just as he overcame his disregard of the vowels
and the self-consciousness which in the early stages of his career used
to hamper and incommode him. His _self_ was to him on a first night what
the shell is to a lobster on dry land. In "Hamlet," when we first acted
together after that long-ago Katherine and Petruchio period at the
Queen's, he used to discuss with me the secret of my freedom from
self-consciousness; and I suggested a more swift entrance on the stage
from the dressing-room. I told him that, in spite of the advantage in
ease which I had gained through having been on the stage when still a
mere child, I should be paralyzed with fright from over-acute
realization of the audience if I stood at the wing for ten minutes, as
he was in the habit of doing. He did not need me then, nor during the
run of our next play, "The Lady of Lyons"; but when it came to Shylock,
a quite new part to him, he tried the experiment, and, as he told me,
with great comfort to himself and success with the audience.
Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite.
Even up to the last five years of his life, Henry Irving was striving,
striving. He never rested on old triumphs, never found a part in which
there was no more to do. Once when I was touring with him in America, at
the time when he was at the highest point of his fame, I watched him
one day in the train--always a delightful occupation, for his face
provided many pictures a minute--and being struck by a curious look,
half puzzled, half despairing, asked him what he was thinking about.
"I was thinking," he answered slowly, "how strange it is that I should
have made the reputation I have as an actor, with nothing to help
me--with no equipment. My legs, my voice--everything has been against
me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk, and has no face to speak
of, I've done pretty well."
And I, looking at that splendid head, those wonderful hands, the whole
strange beauty of him, thought, "Ah, you little know!"
PORTIA
1875
The brilliant story of the Bancroft management of the old Prince of
Wales's Theater was more familiar twenty years back than it is now. I
think that few of the youngest playgoers who point out, on the first
nights of important productions, a remarkably striking figure of a man
with erect carriage, white hair, and flashing dark eyes--a man whose
eye-glass, manners, and clothes all suggest Thackeray and Major
Pendennis, in spite of his success in keeping abreast of everything
modern--few playgoers, I say, who point this man out as Sir Squire
Bancroft could give any adequate account of what he did for the English
theater in the 'seventies. Nor do the public who see an elegant little
lady starting for a drive from a certain house in Berkeley Square
realize that this is Marie Wilton, afterward Mrs. Bancroft, now Lady
Bancroft, the comedienne who created the heroines of Tom Robertson, and,
with her husband, brought what is called the cup-and-saucer drama to
absolute perfection.
We players know quite well and accept with philosophy the fact that when
we have done we are forgotten. We are sometimes told that we live too
much in the public eye and enjoy too much public favor and attention;
but at least we make up for it by leaving no trace of our short and
merry reign behind us when it is over!
I have never, even in Paris, seen anything more admirable than the
ensemble of the Bancroft productions. Every part in the domestic
comedies, the presentation of which, up to 1875, they had made their
policy, was played with such point and finish that the more rough,
uneven, and emotional acting of the present day has not produced
anything so good in the same line. The Prince of Wales's Theater was the
most fashionable in London, and there seemed no reason why the triumph
of Robertson should not go on for ever.
But that's the strange thing about theatrical success. However great, it
is limited in its force and duration, as we found out at the Lyceum
twenty years later. It was not only because the Bancrofts were ambitious
that they determined on a Shakespearean revival in 1875: they felt that
you can give the public too much even of a good thing, and thought that
a complete change might bring their theater new popularity as well as
new honor.
I, however, thought little of this at the time. After my return to the
stage in "The Wandering Heir" and my tour with Charles Reade, my
interest in the theater again declined. It has always been my fate or my
nature--perhaps they are really the same thing--to be very happy or
very miserable. At this time I was very miserable. I was worried to
death by domestic troubles and financial difficulties. The house in
which I first lived in London, after I left Hertfordshire, had been
dismantled of some of its most beautiful treasures by the brokers.
Pressure was being put on me by well-meaning friends to leave this house
and make a great change in my life. Everything was at its darkest when
Mrs. Bancroft came to call on me and offered me the part of Portia in
"The Merchant of Venice."
I had, of course, known her before, in the way that all people in the
theater seem to know each other, and I had seen her act; but on this
day, when she came to me as a kind of messenger of Fate, the harbinger
of the true dawn of my success, she should have had for me some special
and extraordinary significance. I could invest that interview now with
many dramatic features, but my memory, either because it is bad or
because it is good, corrects my imagination.
"May I come in?"
An ordinary remark, truly, to stick in one's head for thirty-odd years!
But it was made in such a _very_ pretty voice--one of the most silvery
voices I have ever heard from any woman except the late Queen Victoria,
whose voice was like a silver stream flowing over golden stones.
The smart little figure--Mrs. Bancroft was, above all things,
_petite_--dressed in black--elegant Parisian black--came into a room
which had been almost completely stripped of furniture. The floor was
covered with Japanese matting, and at one end was a cast of the Venus
of Milo, almost the same colossal size as the original.
Mrs. Bancroft's wonderful gray eyes, examined it curiously. The room,
the statue, and I myself must all have seemed very strange to her. I
wore a dress of some deep yellow woolen material which my little
daughter used to call the "frog dress," because it was speckled with
brown like a frog's skin. It was cut like a Viollet-le-Duc tabard, and
had not a trace of the fashion of the time. Mrs. Bancroft, however, did
not look at me less kindly because I wore aesthetic clothes and was
painfully thin. She explained that they were going to put on "The
Merchant of Venice" at the Prince of Wales's, that she was to rest for a
while for reasons connected with her health; that she and Mr. Bancroft
had thought of me for Portia.
Portia! It seemed too good to be true! I was a student when I was young.
I knew not only every word of the part, but every detail of that period
of Venetian splendor in which the action of the play takes place. I had
studied Vecellio. Now I am old, it is impossible for me to work like
that, but I never acknowledge that I get on as well without it.
Mrs. Bancroft told me that the production would be as beautiful as money
and thought could make it. The artistic side of the venture was to be in
the hands of Mr. Godwin, who had designed my dress for Titania at
Bristol.
"Well, what do you say?" said Mrs. Bancroft. "Will you put your shoulder
to the wheel with us?"
I answered incoherently and joyfully, that of all things I had been
wanting most to play in Shakespeare; that in Shakespeare I had always
felt I would play for half the salary; that--oh, I don't know what I
said! Probably it was all very foolish and unbusinesslike, but the
engagement was practically settled before Mrs. Bancroft left the house,
although I was charged not to say anything about it yet.
But theater secrets are generally _secrets de polichinelle_. When I went
to Charles Reade's house at Albert Gate on the following Sunday for one
of his regular Sunday parties, he came up to me at once with a knowing
look and said:
"So you've got an engagement."
"I'm not to say anything about it."
"It's in Shakespeare!"
"I'm not to tell."
"But I know. I've been thinking it out. It's 'The Merchant of Venice.'"
"Nothing is settled yet. It's on the cards."
"I know! I know!" said wise old Charles. "Well, you'll never have such a
good part as Philippa Chester!"
"No, Nelly, never!" said Mrs. Seymour, who happened to overhear this.
"They call Philippa a Rosalind part. Rosalind! Rosalind is not to be
compared with it!"
Between Mrs. Seymour and Charles Reade existed a friendship of that rare
sort about which it is easy for people who are not at all rare,
unfortunately, to say ill-natured things. Charles Reade worshiped Laura
Seymour, and she understood him and sympathized with his work and his
whims. She died before he did, and he never got over it. The great
success of one of his last plays, "Drink," an adaptation from the
French, in which Charles Warner is still thrilling audiences to this
day, meant nothing to him because she was not alive to share it. The "In
Memoriam" which he had inscribed over her grave is characteristic of the
man, the woman, and their friendship:
HERE LIES THE GREAT HEART OF
LAURA SEYMOUR
I liked Mrs. Seymour so much that I was hurt when I found that she had
instructed Charles Reade to tell Nelly Terry "not to paint her face" in
the daytime, and I was young enough to enjoy revenging myself in my own
way. We used to play childish games at Charles Reade's house sometimes,
and with "Follow my leader" came my opportunity. I asked for a basin of
water and a towel and scrubbed my face with a significant thoroughness.
The rules of the game meant that everyone had to follow my example! When
I had dried my face I powdered it, and then darkened my eyebrows. I
wished to be quite frank about the harmless little bit of artifice which
Mrs. Seymour had exaggerated into a crime. She was now hoist with her
own petard, for, being heavily made up, she could not and would not
follow the leader. After this Charles Reade acquitted me of the use of
"pigments red," but he still kept up a campaign against "Chalky," as he
humorously christened my powder-puff. "Don't be pig-headed, love," he
wrote to me once; "it is because Chalky does not improve you that I
forbid it. Trust unprejudiced and friendly eyes and drop it altogether."
Although Mrs. Seymour was naturally prejudiced where Charles Reade's
work was concerned, she only spoke the truth, pardonably exaggerated,
about the part of Philippa Chester. I know no part which is a patch on
it for effectiveness; yet there is little in it of the stuff which
endures. The play itself was too unbusiness like ever to become a
classic.
Not for years afterwards did I find out that I was not the "first
choice" for Portia. The Bancrofts had tried the Kendals first, with the
idea of making a double engagement; but the negotiations failed. Perhaps
the rivalry between Mrs. Kendal and me might have become of more
significance had she appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales's and
preferred Shakespeare to domestic comedy. In after years she played
Rosalind--I never did, alas!--and quite recently acted with me in "The
Merry Wives of Windsor"; but the best of her fame will always be
associated with such plays as "The Squire," "The Ironmaster," "Lady
Clancarty," and many more plays of that type. When she played with me in
Shakespeare she laughingly challenged me to come and play with her in a
modern piece, a domestic play, and I said, "Done!" but it has not been
done yet, although in Mrs. Clifford's "The Likeness of the Night" there
was a good medium for the experiment. I found Mrs. Kendal wonderful to
act with. No other English actress has such extraordinary skill. Of
course, people have said we are jealous of each other. "Ellen Terry Acts
with Lifelong Enemy," proclaimed an American newspaper in five-inch
type, when we played together as Mistress Page and Mistress Ford in Mr.
Tree's Coronation production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." But the
enmity did not seem to worry us as much as the newspaper men over the
Atlantic had represented.
It was during this engagement in 1902 that a young actor who was
watching us coming in at the stage-door at His Majesty's one day is
reported to have said: "Look at Mr. Tree between his two 'stars'!"
"You mean Ancient Lights!" answered the witty actress to whom the remark
was made.
However, "e'en in our ashes burn our wonted fires," or, to descend from
the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the poetry of Gray to the
pantomime gag of Drury Lane and Herbert Campbell, "Better to be a good
old has-been than a never-was-er!"
But it was long before the "has-been" days that Mrs. Kendal decided not
to bring her consummately dexterous and humorous workmanship to the task
of playing Portia, and left the field open for me. My fires were only
just beginning to burn. Success I had had of a kind, and I had tasted
the delight of knowing that audiences liked me, and had liked them back
again. But never until I appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales's had
I experienced that awe-struck feeling which comes, I suppose, to no
actress more than once in a lifetime--the feeling of the conqueror. In
homely parlance, I knew that I had "got them" at the moment when I spoke
the speech beginning, "You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand."
"What can this be?" I thought. "_Quite_ this thing has never come to me
before! _This is different!_ It has never been quite the same before."
It was never to be quite the same again.
Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke of the mighty
wing of glory--call it by any name, think of it as you like--it was as
Portia that I had my first and last sense of it. And, while it made me
happy, it made me miserable because I foresaw, as plainly as my own
success, another's failure.
Charles Coghlan, an actor whose previous record was fine enough to
justify his engagement as Shylock, showed that night the fatal quality
of _indecision_.
A worse performance than his, carried through with decision and attack,
might have succeeded, but Coghlan's Shylock was not even bad. It was
_nothing_.
You could hardly hear a word he said. He spoke as though he had a sponge
in his mouth, and moved as if paralyzed. The perspiration poured down
his face; yet what he was doing no one could guess. It was a case of
moral cowardice rather than incompetency. At rehearsals no one had
entirely believed in him, and this, instead of stinging him into a
resolution to triumph, had made him take fright and run away.
People felt that they were witnessing a great play with a great part cut
out, and "The Merchant of Venice" ran for three weeks!
It was a pity, if only because a more gorgeous and complete little
spectacle had never been seen on the English stage. Veronese's "Marriage
in Cana" had inspired many of the stage pictures, and the expenditure in
carrying them out had been lavish.
In the casket scene I wore a dress like almond-blossom. I was very thin,
but Portia and all the ideal _young_ heroines of Shakespeare ought to
be thin. Fat is fatal to ideality!
I played the part more stiffly and more slowly at the Prince of Wales's
than I did in later years. I moved and spoke slowly. The clothes seemed
to demand it, and the setting of the play developed the Italian feeling
in it, and let the English Elizabethan side take care of itself. The
silver casket scene with the Prince of Aragon was preserved, and so was
the last act, which had hitherto been cut out in nearly all stage
versions.
I have tried five or six different ways of treating Portia, but the way
I think best is not the one which finds the heartiest response from my
audiences. Has there ever been a dramatist, I wonder, whose parts admit
of as many different interpretations as do Shakespeare's? There lies his
immortality as an acting force. For times change, and parts have to be
acted differently for different generations. Some parts are not
sufficiently universal for this to be possible, but every ten years an
actor can reconsider a Shakespeare part and find new life in it for his
new purpose and new audiences.
The aesthetic craze, with all its faults, was responsible for a great
deal of true enthusiasm for anything beautiful. It made people welcome
the Bancrofts' production of "The Merchant of Venice" with an
appreciation which took the practical form of an offer to keep the
performances going by subscription, as the general public was not
supporting them. Sir Frederick and Lady Pollock, James Spedding, Edwin
Arnold, Sir Frederick Leighton and others made the proposal to the
Bancrofts, but nothing came of it.
Short as the run of the play was, it was a wonderful time for me.
Everyone seemed to be in love with me! I had sweethearts by the dozen,
known and unknown. Most of the letters written to me I destroyed long
ago, but the feeling of sweetness and light with which some of them
filled me can never be destroyed. The task of reading and answering
letters has been a heavy one all my life, but it would be ungrateful to
complain of it. To some people expression is life itself. Half my
letters begin: "I cannot help writing to tell you," and I believe that
this is the simple truth. I, for one, should have been poorer, though my
eyes might have been stronger, if they _had_ been able to help it.
There turns up to-day, out of a long-neglected box, a charming note
about "The Merchant of Venice" from some unknown friend.
"Playing to such houses," he wrote, "is not an encouraging pursuit; but
to give to human beings the greatest pleasure that they are capable of
receiving must always be worth doing. You have given me that pleasure,
and I write to offer you my poor thanks. Portia has always been my
favorite heroine, and I saw her last night as sweet and lovely as I had
always hoped she might be. I hope that I shall see you again in other
Shakespearean characters, and that nothing will tempt you to withhold
your talents from their proper sphere."
The audiences may have been scanty, but they were wonderful.
O'Shaughnessy, Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Gilbert, and, I think
Swinburne were there. A poetic and artistic atmosphere pervaded the
front of the house as well as the stage itself.
TOM TAYLOR AND LAVENDER SWEEP
I have read in some of the biographies of me that have been published
from time to time, that I was chagrined at Coghlan's fiasco because it
brought my success as Portia so soon to an end. As a matter of fact, I
never thought about it. I was just sorry for clever Coghlan, who was
deeply hurt and took his defeat hardly and moodily. He wiped out the
public recollection of it to a great extent by his Evelyn in "Money,"
Sir Charles Pomander in "Masks and Faces," and Claude Melnotte in "The
Lady of Lyons," which he played with me at the Princess's Theater for
one night only in the August following the withdrawal of "The Merchant
of Venice."
I have been credited with great generosity for appearing in that single
performance of "The Lady of Lyons." It was said that I wanted to help
Coghlan reinstate himself, and so on. Very likely there was some such
feeling in the matter, but there was also a good part and good
remuneration! I remember that I played Lytton's proud heroine better
then than I did at the Lyceum five years later, and Coghlan was more
successful as Melnotte than Henry Irving. But I was never really _good_.
I tried in vain to have sympathy with a lady who was addressed as
"haughty cousin," yet whose very pride had so much inconsistency. How
could any woman fall in love with a cad like Melnotte? I used to ask
myself despairingly. The very fact that I tried to understand Pauline
was against me. There is only one way to play her, and to be bothered by
questions of sincerity and consistency means that you will miss that way
for a certainty!
I missed it, and fell between two stools. Finding that it was useless
to depend upon feeling, I groped after the definite rules which had
always governed the delivery of Pauline's fustian, and the fate that
commonly overtakes those who try to put old wine into new bottles
overtook me.
I knew for instance, exactly how the following speech ought to be done,
but I never could do it. It occurs in the fourth act, where Beauseant,
after Pauline has been disillusioned, thinks it will be an easy matter
to induce the proud beauty to fly with him:
"Go! (_White to the lips._) Sir, leave this house! It is humble;
but a husband's roof, however lowly, is, in the eyes of God and
man, the temple of a wife's honor. (_Tumultuous applause._) Know
that I would rather starve--aye, _starve_--with him who has
betrayed me than accept _your_ lawful hand, even were you the
prince whose name he bore. (_Hurrying on quickly to prevent
applause before the finish._) _Go!_"
It is easy to laugh at Lytton's rhetoric, but very few dramatists have
had a more complete mastery of theatrical situations, and that is a good
thing to be master of. Why the word "theatrical" should have come to be
used in a contemptuous sense I cannot understand. "Musical" is a word of
praise in music; why not "theatrical" in a theater? A play in any age
which holds the boards so continuously as "The Lady of Lyons" deserves
more consideration than the ridicule of those who think that the world
has moved on because our playwrights write more naturally than Lytton
did. The merit of the play lay, not in its bombast, but in its
situation.
Before Pauline I had played Clara Douglas in a revival of "Money," and I
found her far more interesting and possible. To act the _balance_ of the
girl was keen enjoyment; it foreshadowed some of that greater enjoyment
I was to have in after years when playing Hermione--another well-judged,
well-balanced mind, a woman who is not passion's slave, who never
answers on the spur of the moment, but from the depths of reason and
divine comprehension. I didn't agree with Clara Douglas's sentiments but
I saw her point of view, and that was everything.
Tom Taylor, like Charles Reade, never hesitated to speak plainly to me
about my acting, and, after the first night of "Money," wrote me a
letter full of hints and caution and advice: